Arthur, a professional painter who lived alone and not once allowed another person into his home, bought a blue-painted wood table from the furniture store down the road. He did not like the color and so decided to paint the table to look like a redwood table. Shortly after, Arthur unexpectedly died. Stanley, a young graduate, happened upon the sale of Arthur’s possessions. Stanley decided to buy the redwood table, since it reminded him of the time he visited the redwood trees in California. After buying the table, an appraiser walked by and complimented the quality of the redwood table. Stanley had a justified true belief that the table was redwood. However, when Arthur first bought the table, he did not know that the blue-painted wood table was originally made from redwood and so had a redwood finish.
Can Stanley be said to truly know that the table is redwood?
If justified true belief is no longer an all encompassing criterion of knowledge as Plato once speculated, what then can we know for certain?
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